Within the past decade, South Africa has gained worldwide attention for violent masculinities, manifested remarkably through high rates of sexual assault with public sanction, "corrective" rapes of lesbians, intentional HIV infections, sexual violence targeting infants, and debates over intersexuality. Challenges to the composition of male masculinities have been the subject of sensationalist journalism and public discussion and led to stigma, medical maltreatment, and aggressive policing. This presentation will highlight particular moments in the past decade of such controversies, centering on how and why debates about gender codify its meaning.

If all writing is fundamentally tied to the production of meanings and texts, then feminist research that blurs the borders of academia and activism is necessarily about the labor and politics of mobilizing experience for particular ends. Co-authoring stories is a chief tool by which feminists working in alliances across borders mobilize experience to write against relations of power that produce social violence, and to imagine and enact their own visions and ethics of social change. Such work demands a serious engagement with the complexities of identity, representation, and political imagination as well as a rethinking of the assumptions and possibilities associated with engagement and expertise. This presentation draws upon 16 years of partnership with activists in India and with academic co-authors in the US to reflect on how story telling across social, geographical, and institutional borders can enhance critical engagement with questions of violence and struggles for social change, while also troubling dominant discourses and methodologies inside and outside of the academy. In offering six "truths" of alliance work, this talk reflects on the labor process, assumptions, possibilities, and risks associated with co-authorship as a tool for mobilizing intellectual spaces in which stories from multiple locations in an alliance can speak with one another and evolve into more nuanced critical interventions.

Richa Nagar is Professor of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota and she has worked closely with Sangtin Kisaan Mazdoor Sangathan (Sangtin Peasants and Workers Organization) in Sitapur District of India. She has co-authored Sangtin Yatra (Sangtin, 2004), Playing with Fire (University of Minnesota Press and Zubaan, 2006), A World of Difference (Guilford, 2009), and Ek Aur Neemsaar (Rajkamal Prakashan, 2012) and she has co-edited Critical Transnational Feminist Studies (SUNY Press, 2010). She has been a residential fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) in Stanford and at the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute for Advanced Studies in New Delhi.

Mirta Kupferminc is a Jewish Argentine visual artist whose exuberant, often challenging work encodes complex stories of gender, diaspora, space, and the body. Kupferminc's images, set in the context of other visual representations that function as maps of desire, politics, and, often, women's bodies provide an insight into the metaphorical power of cartography.

Description:
How has human trafficking been described and made real through legal, political and cultural sites? What visual economies shape the consumption of certain kinds of images of trafficking and what is at stake in posing human rights through (neo)liberal terms? Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this presentation examines how human trafficking (and more specifically sex trafficking) has become a political and cultural reality for US audiences by mapping the ways government, media and scholarly research have framed and narrated trafficking. This presentation looks at the production of human trafficking as a contemporary human rights concern in order to draw attention to the historical and continuing ways knowledge of racialized sexualities shapes and polices US national belonging as well as notions of global, human rights citizenship.

Congratulations to Ms. Pauline Gleisberg for being crowned Ms. Wheelchair Minnesota 2012! She describes herself as driven, adventurous and caring. During her reign, she will continue to work on her platform: "Advocating social interaction as part of maintaining an active lifestyle for people with disabilities." Full story here.

Make sure to visit the newly designed Gender, Sexuality, Power, and Politics (GSSP) Colloquium website! The colloquium is a joint collaboration between the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. To learn more about this collaboration, about past and upcoming events, click here.

Congratulations to Idalia P. Robles De León and to Jerod Greenisen on becoming the recipients of the Helen Hawthorne Hartung Award Competition for best feminist writing! We were impressed by the quality of the work we received from our GWSS undergraduate students. Our most sincere thanks to all the students who applied!